The bridge and connecting tunnel were built as part of the
Big Dig, the largest
highway construction project in the
United States. The northbound lanes were finished in March 2003, and the southbound lanes in December. The bridge's unique styling quickly became an
icon for Boston, often featured in the backdrop of national news channels, to establish location, and included on tourist souvenirs. The bridge is commonly referred to as the "Zakim Bridge" or "Bunker Hill Bridge" by residents of nearby
Charlestown.

Contents

Design

In a
cable-stayed bridge, instead of hanging the roadbed from cables slung between towers, the cables run directly between the roadbed and the towers. Although cable-stayed bridges have been common in
Europe since
World War II, they are relatively new to
North America.

The bridge concept was developed by
Swisscivil engineerChristian Menn and its design was engineered by American civil engineer Ruchu Hsu with Parsons Brinckerhoff. Wallace Floyd Associates, sub-consultants to Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, was the lead architect/urban designer and facilitated community participation during the design process.[4][5] The engineer of record is HNTB/FIGG. The lead designers were
Theodore Zoli (from
HNTB), Sajal Banerjee and W. Denney Pate (from FIGG).[citation needed] The bridge follows a new design in which, besides having its eight primary lanes running through the towers, a pair of northbound lanes are
cantilevered outside of the cable-stays. It has a striking, graceful appearance that is meant to echo the tower of the
Bunker Hill Monument, which is within view of the bridge, and the white cables evoke imagery of the rigging of the
USS Constitution, docked nearby.

Name

The bridge's full name commemorates Boston civic leader and civil rights activist
Leonard P. Zakim who championed "building bridges between peoples",[6] and the
Battle of Bunker Hill. Originally, Massachusetts Governor A.
Paul Cellucci sought to name it the "Freedom Bridge". In 2000, however, local clergy and religious leaders, including Cardinal
Bernard Francis Law, requested the Zakim name shortly after Zakim's death from
myeloma. Although Cellucci agreed to the naming, community leaders from
Charlestown objected to the name as they felt that since the design reflected the nearby Bunker Hill memorial, it should be named the "Bunker Hill Freedom bridge". Allegations of
antisemitism were leveled against members of the mostly white, Irish Catholic community as reasons for resistance to the Zakim name, based on some comments quoted in the Boston Globe. Several local neo-Nazis also complained about the honor for Zakim and launched an unsuccessful petition drive to drop his name from the Bunker Hill one (the petition needed 100 signatures to be reviewed by the Massachusetts State Legislature and only 20 people signed it). In response, several community leaders spoke out against the allegations in a press conference, stating that the claims, made by Professor
Jonathan Sarna, were his alone and did not reflect the community's historical (not racial) basis of favoring the "Bunker Hill" name, though they dodged questions about the false claim that no Jews had fought in the battle of Bunker Hill.[7]

Eventually a compromise between the
Boston City Council, the
Massachusetts State Legislature and community activists brought about the current name. As with the
Hoover Dam, different communities call the bridge by different colloquial names. Many people in the Charlestown area refer to it as the "Bunker Hill Bridge", while most, including the local press and traffic monitoring services, refer to it as the "Zakim Bridge".

Landscape design and public art

Placement of footings for the Zakim Bridge required environmental permits to relocate areas of open water surface, changing the contour of the
Charles River shoreline. The process of landscape design and environmental mitigation under the bridge deck and around the bridge supports allowed for the creation of a new and accessible public landscape designed by Carol R. Johnson Associates. This under bridge landscape contains a series of perforated stainless steel lighting-based public artworks, entitled, Five Beacons for the Lost Half Mile.

Dedication

The bridge was dedicated on October 4, 2002, in a ceremony held on the new span. The dedication speakers included members of Zakim's family, government officials, and a performance of the song "
Thunder Road" by
Bruce Springsteen.[9]

Introducing the song, Springsteen said about Zakim, "... I knew him a little bit during the last year of his life, he was one of those people whose, intensity, inner spirit you could feel even when he was very ill and uh. ... I guess, you know, we honor his memory obviously not with this beautiful bridge, very lovely, but by continuing on in his fight for social justice."[10]

Miscellaneous facts

On
Mother's Day of 2002, more than 200,000 people waited in long lines for a one-time only chance to walk on the bridge, almost a year before the structure was opened to vehicular traffic.[11]

On October 14, 2002, fourteen elephants from the
Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, weighing a total of 112,000 pounds (51,000 kg), were walked across the bridge to "test" it. (In the nineteenth century, elephants were sometimes used to test bridges‍—‌such as the
Eads Bridge in
St. Louis and the
Brooklyn Bridge in
New York City[12]‍—‌not only because of their great weight, but because of a superstition that elephants had a special instinct preventing them from setting foot on unsafe structures.)[13]

Although the bridge was completed in 2002, it was not opened to traffic until the northbound
Central Artery tunnel opened in early 2003. The southbound lanes were opened in December 2003, with the opening of the southbound tunnel, and the cantilevered northbound lanes (a two-lane entrance ramp) opened in April 2005, when the old bridge was improved. It acts as a complete replacement for the previous three-lane, dual-height steel bridge, the
Charlestown High Bridge. The different heights of the lanes of the I-93 elevated highway in
Charlestown are the only remaining hints to the layout of the old bridge.

In March 2005, ice fell off the cables and landed on the roadway below in large enough chunks to possibly break windshields, or even endanger motorists, stopping traffic.[14]

The
Travel Channel ranked the Zakim Bridge 9th in their list of the World's Top Ten Bridges. The article also points out that, at the time of publication, the bridge was the widest cable-stayed bridge in the world, but with only 10 lanes for traffic.[15]